Tuesday, May 22, 2018

Three Unexamined Assumptions in The Theory Of Male-Incels-As-Unserved-Customers-In-The-Sexual-Marketplace

1. The smellydebate about incels (the involuntarily celibate, but only male), mass killings (by the incels, as defined above) and the market place for sex (as a description of all heterosexual partnering!) is based on this implicit assumption which needs to be made explicit:

That there are now many more young male incels than in the past???

I have seen no data on that, but the marriage rates do not support that assumption. It's quite possible that the number of men who can't get unhindered access to the exact pussy they think they deserve has stayed fairly constant over time. Only now that group is much more vocal and vicious, at least online.

It also has the support of such deep thinkers as Jordan Peterson, who has recommended enforced monogamy as the solution to this lack-of-pussy problem. So the most unbalanced incels now get validation not only from their fellow-sufferers, but from conservative mega-stars!

That validation even extends to at least "understanding" how violence is the predictable response from these newly created vast masses of incels. I looked at Peterson's own website (Google Peterson and enforced monogamy) where he attacks the recent NYT article on his opinions and explains to us why everything he says is just recommending your ordinary monogamy because it keeps men from killing so much. As compared to a system where a small percentage of men hoard all women, just to be clear*.

2. It's all science based, mind you, and Peterson proves it by quoting the thoughts of such eminent evolutionary psychologists as Daly and Wilson and Buss. Buss, for example, has argued that women are hard-wired for hypergamy, always going for the top guys in the hierarchy, and Peterson takes this argument for evidence**.

There's a difference between a theory and evidence, by the way, though that eludes professor Peterson here***.

Indeed, the whole incel debate is based on very little evidence of any kind, but many, many hidden assumptions, and one of those really is the assumption that some minority of men is currently monopolizing all women, and that this is because women are hard-wired to go for high status men only.

And alternative theories can explain why historically speaking women have tended to want to marry up in the hierarchies of education or income:

The simplest one points out that in the past it was largely men who had legal access to higher education or greater wealth or incomes. This left marriage one of the only ways for women to improve their economic position. Thus, it's not necessary to assume that women have little gold-digger genes inside their brains to explain why we would find hypergamy among women in the past.

3. You may have noticed how the problem of involuntary celibacy is framed as a purely heterosexual male problem. It's a problem of not enough pussy for men.

In reality, the majority of those who are celibate but would prefer not to be are quite likely to be women. That is because women, on average, tend to outlive their partners, and because there are also younger women, not just younger men, who cannot find sexual partners.

The online incels don't care about those women's access to sex, both because for them women are mere objects to be desired and hated, but also because of the basic evolutionary psychology framework the incel world is built on. Peterson uses the same framework, both on his site and in his recent book:

The assumption that ONLY women make choices about their sexual partners, and that ONLY women, therefore, have the power to reject.

Men, on the other hand, are always willing to f**k anything that breathes, I guess?

It would be fun to see how all those sexual marketplace conservatives would react if we started demanding a fairer distribution of male bodies for all those older female incels. While the terminology of sexual markets may initially seem gender-neutral, in practice what those guys worry about is access to pussy.

&&&

I wrote this yesterday before a migraine attack felled me for sixteen hours. On re-reading it, I wonder what made me bother. Was it my pre-migraine state?

I get that I'm trying to point out how my long-term focus on bad evolutionary psychology has had an important point, how ignoring the problems in that approach has turned it into the basic philosophy of incels and most of the woman-hating sites, and how we now see it applied to real living people, with bad consequences.

I can also see how not thinking carefully about facts and statistics allows the incel sites to believe their weird theories, in particular if they never go out and try to actually date women or see, outside in flesh-space, how all sorts of people, many not physically attractive based on our cultural standards, are happily paired and have children.

And it's frightening that a wide debate about the incels can go on without, seemingly, any actual data about how common being a young male incel today is, as compared to the past. It's hair-raisingly frightening that gurus such as Peterson can calmly argue that mass violence is a natural reaction to blue balls in young men.

It's also disheartening that Peterson's arguments for the return of what essentially amounts to patriarchy is viewed by many as a message from a prophet.

But still. Anyway, here it is, and I hope it will keep my chattering inner muse Erato (he with the sexy tattoos and wild nose rings) silent for a few days.

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* Which, weirdly, he assumes to be the prevailing situation in the US and Canada? Or does he? I'm not sure. But it's worth pointing out that we do have socially enforced monogamy in those countries. Polygamy is frowned upon, and the majority of people either marry at some point or enter a long-term relationship with one other person.

** As do all the online incels. It's the few lucky Chads (high status
men) who have so much sex with all the Tracys (desirable women with big
boobs) that the Tracys are used up (though not the Chads) and have stretched out pussies by the
age thirty when the incels are expected to marry these leftovers.

*** Severalstudies show that mate preferences between men and women are becoming more similar (and quite rapidly) in the more gender-egalitarian countries (where women can more easily acquire wealth in ways other than through marriage) . This is direct evidence against the assumption that hypergamy is hard-wired in female brains.

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